1 x 1 hour Class per week and 1 x 2 hour Seminar per week when not on professional experience placement

Professional experience: Students will be required to complete a 15 day professional experience placement

Content

This is the fourth of the six units in the education studies major. This unit explores and critiques the institutional and psychological discourses that influence and define learners in schools. The students will examine how different developmental and learning theories can be accommodated in the curriculum and classroom teaching, and become familiar with the literature and research underpinning these theories as well as a range of related pedagogical models. They will be able to apply these understandings to the development of their classroom management repertoire and the promotion of successful learning. The unit includes discussion of school assessment processes as systemic ways of knowing and representing learners. The unit will involve in-depth and contextualised discussion of the ways learners are ‘known’ in classrooms. Students will adopt a range of ways of seeing learners from the theoretical literature from this unit and the previous unit on pedagogy. The students will finally critique these revised ways of seeing learners through revisiting the place of their own beliefs and philosophical stance.

Assessment

Responses to seminar tasks: 25%, 700 words or equivalent

Analysis of a school policy: 35%, 1000 words or equivalent

‘Reading’ professional practice: 40%, 1100 words or equivalent

Hurdle Requirement: Satisfactory completion of the professional experience placement is required in order to pass this unit